Minnesota forward Kirill Kaprizov scored six points in the match with Vancouver

Minnesota Wild forward Kirill Kaprizov gave an excellent individual performance in terms of productivity in a home match against the Vancouver Canucks. Minnesota defeated a powerful opponent 10:7, and Kaprizov scored three goals and three assists, becoming only the third Russian in NHL history to score at least six points in one game.

It seems that none of the North American media resources reporting on this match managed to avoid the temptation to play with the name of the club that prevailed in it. And in fact, what happened on the site went well with the word wild – “wild”.

The scenario of the meeting was, to put it mildly, extraordinary even by the standards of the NHL, which is accustomed to all sorts of plot tricks. At the end of the second period, it seemed that there wouldn’t be any of them. “Vancouver” – by the way, the leader of the summary table of the regular season – was quite confidently moving towards success in the match with a team that is outside the “play-off zone” of the Western Conference and, in order to reach the cup stage, must cling to every point. But how do you get hooked when the score is already 2:5?

And just then that wild pandemonium began, which was impossible to imagine.

Minnesota narrowed the gap even before the break, and after it unleashed a machine-gun burst of goals – half a dozen in a period of less than five minutes! The NHL hasn’t seen such a rate of fire for a quarter of a century.

But that’s not all. The Vancouver hockey players, who during the beating looked as if they wanted not to play, but to run home from the arena at the first opportunity, somehow came to their senses and were able to reduce the opponent’s lead to a minimum, hitting the opponent’s goal twice. Replacing the goalkeeper with a sixth field player has become urgent. But it didn’t bring anything good to Vancouver. It brought only two more goals into his now empty net.

In general, an unusual match, which, among other things, is also notable for its personal stories. Minnesota had two heroes who made the greatest contribution to its victory. Swede Juel Eriksson-Ek and Russian Kirill Kaprizov scored a hat-trick, supplemented with three assists.

Six points for a player in a single match is, in principle, a rather rare achievement (for Minnesota, for example, only Slovakian Marian Gaborik scored so many). And in the case of Kaprizov, it was completely remarkable, giving a reason to remember the past – fresh and long ago.

The fact is that he turned out to be only the third domestic hockey player who managed to score at least half a dozen points in one game. True, Kaprizov still did not reach the record.

The record, meanwhile, will be 34 years old in a few days. It belongs to the great CSKA forward Sergei Makarov. In 1989, Makarov became one of the first, still small, wave of Soviet hockey players who were allowed to leave to play in the NHL. The striker ended up in the Calgary Flames and was shocked by how quickly he was able to adapt to new conditions. Makarov immediately became the leader of Calgary, and on February 25, 1990, he played a great match against the Edmonton Oilers, the most important opponent for his club. In it, Sergei Makarov scored two goals and gave five assists, providing the team with a large 10:4 win.

And the only Russian who was able to even get close to him, before Kirill Kaprizov, was Nikita Kucherov. Moreover, the explosion of the Tampa Bay forward also took place in the current championship, albeit in its first half. In November, Tampa crushed Carolina 8-2, thanks in large part to Kucherov’s two goals and four assists.

He now leads the championship scoring race with 94 points (Nathan MacKinnon from the Colorado Avalanche has three less). Kirill Kaprizov in this classification, and after the extravaganza staged in the meeting with Vancouver, is located much lower – just outside the top twenty – he has 57 points. But he missed several championship matches due to injury. However, in February Kaprizov plays in such a way that it won’t be strange if by the end of the regular season he rises sharply in the rankings. In the four matches preceding the wild game against Vancouver, the Russian scored eight points.

Alexey Dospehov